Circles toward Monday

Here is a brief outline of the TIME process: the Newsmagazine "goes to bed" Monday night so that it can be printed and distributed across the nation on Thursday, for reading over the weekend. TIME editorial workers have Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. TIME'S editorial operations are laid out in a series of concentric circles. As the week wears on, the focus of activity contracts from circle to circle toward the center.

The outermost circle is the Associated Press report, other news services, the newspapers, and TIME'S correspondents. On Thursday, TIME'S New York office has story suggestions from the bureaus. Editors there send correspondents detailed queries. On Thursday and Friday the correspondents are busy getting answers to these queries. Meanwhile, in New York a writer and a researcher are assigned to each story.

The researchers, under the direction of Senior Editor Content Peckham and five departmental chief researchers, form the next circle. They spend Thursday afternoon and Friday digging up material available in TIME'S morgue, in other libraries; they interview New York sources of information.

By late Friday or Saturday, activity is concentrated in the next circle, the writers, who have spent the preceding day going over available material.

TIME writers rarely make Saturday night engagements ; that is the time when they are trying to shape the research--yards of cables, pounds of memoranda, newspaper clippings, books--into stories.

Their stories go to the copy desk, which bears no resemblance to a newspaper copy desk. It is a busy traffic center where stories are typed, "styled" for capitalization, etc., counted for an estimate of how much space they will take in the magazine.

The copy desk sends the stories back to the department's senior editor. There are six departmental senior editors, each with a staff of writers and researchers. The senior editors form the next circle; their day of misery or joy is Sunday, and their task is to act as "arms" of the managing editor. They sometimes hand stories back to be written again--occasionally four or five times. By Sunday, if the stories are not "right," the senior editor rewrites them.

When stories are passed by senior editors, the copy desk sends them to the circles' center, Managing Editor Matthews. From the start of the work week he has been reading papers, magazines, dispatches, trying to get the "feel" of the week's news, to figure out what is important and what isn't. He has probably sent out 40 or 50 notes to editors and writers. These include suggestions ranging from an outline of the lead story in National Affairs to a nice phrase from the Economist. A dozen times a day, he is in touch with his senior editors and with Executive Editor Roy Alexander, whose job is to keep the editorial machinery running smoothly.

Matthews may send a story back to a senior editor for further work; he may okay it unchanged. More often, he makes his own changes, fills the margin ' with suggestions, questions and cautionary comments. The copy then goes to the researchers for checking. Charged with verifying every word, they put a dot over each one to signify that they have. Their more important job is to make sure that the story as a whole adds up; sometimes every statement in a story may be true and yet the story as a whole give a false impression. In this process the researchers confer with writers and senior editors, dredge more material out of the morgue, make scores of telephone calls.

Meanwhile, Matthews has allotted space to each department and chosen illustrations (news photographs, cartoons, historical pictures) in conference with Picture & Make-Up Editor Robert Boyd. When the stories are checked they are ready for the teletypesetters. Machines in TIME'S New York office wire the copy simultaneously to the Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles printing plants. Boyd and his assistants in New York paste up proofs on huge sheets, tell editors, late on Monday night, where lines must be added or killed to make pages fit.

Matthews, who has been managing editor for five years, is the "one man" through whose head all TIME stories go before they are directed toward TIME'S mythical "one man" reader. Before he scribbles TSM on the upper righthand corner of the copy, Matthews has to understand the story, to believe it, and to admit grudgingly that its language is as clear, forceful and readable as it can reasonably be made. His taste sets TIME'S style, his interest and values have an important (but not by any means the only) influence on what TIME says. Editors, writers, correspondents, researchers are all entitled to a hearing on disputed points. Victory is supposed to go to the most sense-making argument.

Matthews reports to and consults Editor Luce, who stands responsible, along with Matthews, for whatever TIME says. Luce watches the TIME operation for opportunities to improve methods, and for signs that standards are not being met.

In the '30s, TIME helped give currency to a phrase "group journalism." It wishes it hadn't. Wherever two or three journalists are gathered together, there, of course, is group journalism. If group journalism means that nobody is responsible because everybody is responsible, then TIME repudiates it. Its Editor and Managing Editor, like those of any other publication, are and always have been the responsible editors. Every other TIME staff member is responsible for whatever he or she contributes (or omits to contribute) to the week's work.

This operation is, in practice, considerably less rigid and more fallible than it may look on paper. The researchers' dots do not eliminate all error, though the system catches scores of mistakes every week. Writers "freeze up" on stories and stare out the window for hours. Editors get impossible ideas that waste the time of writers, researchers and correspondents. Even the managing editor sometimes gets a literary allusion wrong.

TIME'S editorial offices occupy the 28th and 29th floors of the TIME & LIFE Building in Rockefeller Center. They are plainly furnished and littered with paper. The prevailing atmosphere is tension, tempered by absent-minded civility. Until a lot of newspapermen got on TIME'S staff, the office boys used to whistle at their work; now they obey the 50-year-old newspaper taboo against whistling. On some evenings, still, an old Timer will call Matthews on the office phone and say: "Don't miss the sunset."

That is the editorial department. It is only a part--numerically a small part--of TIME. Publisher James Linen presides over the advertising, promotion and distribution of TIME and represents the whole magazine in TIME Inc.

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